PalmSource jumps on Linux for mobile phones

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Dec. 08, 2004

[Updated 12:30 P.M., PST] -- PalmSource announced today that it will soon offer PalmOS as a middleware and application stack for Linux mobile phones. "PalmOS for Linux" will target smartphone manufacturers in China, initially. To gain a local presence, PalmSource has acquired successful mobile phone application software startup China MobileSoft.

PalmSource's director of business development, David Limp, said, "Local presence and local engineering is the only way to be successful in China. From Coca-Cola to Buick, they're successful because they take a long term strategy, and put local resources there immediately."

China is generally considered to represent the world's largest mobile phone market, with nearly as many current mobile subscribers as the entire U.S. population. In the past, most phones in China have used simple, proprietary operating systems developed in house, but that's all changing, according to Limp.

"A lot of manufacturers up until now have developed their own software," states Limp. "The first generation phones were voice only, or voice only plus a few features. Now, the average phone in China has a camera, and MMS, and the carriers are putting infrastructure in place to support these features. The effort to create the software is getting more difficult. This has already happened in the global market, resulting in companies such as OpenWave... This trend is now starting to happen in China."

Indeed, China MobileSoft has been an early beneficiary of this trend. The company's platform-independent MMS, tri-mode mBrowser, bluetooth stack, email application, and other phone products have already appeared in more than a million phones, it says, while it counts some eleven different phone manufacturers among its customers. Its merger with PalmSource will enable it to enhance its mobile phone applications with the familiar Palm look and feel, it says.

Additionally, China MobileSoft sells a feature-phone platform and a smartphone platform. The latter is based on mLinux, an embedded distribution that supports a wide range of architectures and processors, including a Dragonball chip used in some Palm devices and Linux PDAs. However, according to PalmSource's director of product marketing, Chris Dunphy, PalmSource is unlikely to offer a complete phone stack, including the Linux OS layer, any time soon. "Some customers will want an all-you-can-eat solution from us, including the kernel. But that's down the road a ways."

Instead, much as Trolltech has done with its Qtopia Phone Edition, PalmSource will re-jigger its PDA application stack and market it to phone manufacturers responsible for developing their own Linux kernels. "It's not that hard to get Linux running on a device," said Limp. "What's hard is getting it to actually work on a carrier's network."

Initially, then, PalmSource hopes to expand the market for its mobile device applications by riding the early success of China MobileSoft in the fledgling market for mobile phone application software. It also believes that some of China MobileSoft's software will enjoy the broader market prospects it can offer through its worldwide marketing and sales channel.

For more on China MobileSoft, don't miss this article by China MobileSoft founders.

PalmSource background, and the "enterprise" angle

Palmsource spun out of a 2003 merger between PDA makers Palm and Handspring that also created what would later become the PalmOne hardware company. PalmSource maintains the PalmOS operating system and application stack, which it licenses to PalmOne and a dozen manufacturers producing Palm-compatible hardware platforms.

PalmSource also markets development kits that enable enterprise and vertical market software developers to write mobile applications for devices running PalmOS. Given Palm's longevity and popularity in the mobile device market, a tremendous amount of such software exists, including medical software, legal software, salesforce automation software, warehouse management software, and proprietary in-house enterprise-specific applications.

PalmSource will continue to market its Garnet and Cobalt operating systems, but clearly hopes third party and enterprise PalmOS application developers will come along for the ride up to Linux. Among other benefits, users running PalmOS applications on Linux smartphones could likely access enterprise resources remotely, using VPN (virtual private network) software over their carrier's mobile data network.

Linux transition strategy

Older "Garnet" applications, written for 68K processors, currently run on top of modern OMAP- and XScale-based Palm-compatible hardware through an ABI (application binary interface) layer, which will simply be ported to Linux, enabling Garnet apps to run unmodified if "properly written," according to Dunphy, under PalmOS for Linux.

Newer "Cobalt" applications, which run natively on contemporary Palm-compatible hardware, will require little more than a recompile, according to Dunphy. However, Dunphy admits that PalmSource has not yet finalized its technical strategy for achieving Cobalt support on PalmOS for Linux.

Limp said, "PalmOS for Linux phones can be used in verticals, such as medical, and legal, and all the other places where we're so good today."

To summarize, PalmOS will become a middleware layer and application stack that should run on most any Linux kernel. PalmOS will not be available under an open source license. Rather, PalmSource will continue to license the technology to hardware partners. However, those hardware partners will no longer be limited to "palm-compatible hardware," but will be positioned to evaluate, design, and build on any of the myriad hardware platforms that support Linux.

Additional technical details about PalmOS for Linux are available in an open letter to the Linux community published today by PalmSource. PalmSource expects to announce further details of PalmOS for Linux at a developers conference in April.

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